personal

WOW! its been a long time since my last update... and a really long time since an update on my personal life.

anyway, here is a quick run down of stuff going on in my life:

i traded my laptop i had for an old Acer system. the system is all black, including the monitor. the system was a Pentium 60, with 8 megs of ram. i gutted the main system and put a Pentium MMX 266 in it with my Banshee and TV card. it now serves as a nice entertainment center in my new place - which brings me to the next event in my life -

i just moved! i finally got out of my mom's basement after months and into an apartment with my wife and daughter. its a nice spacious two bedroom place in my hometown. rent is cheap, and its in a great location. i was able to keep my same phone number after moving (my phone number has changed like 5 times in the past three years for every time i moved).

there were two bad things about moving, one was that i am without DSL again, and stuck on a 56k modem (which i make connect at 33.6 for games). the other bad thing is that i can't have gerbils! one of the things that was on the contract here was that small animals like mice, gerbils, rats, ferrets, etc are not allowed. that means that this is the first time in 11 years that i dont have a gerbil! no more gerbil cam, ever (or at least until i move to someplace where having a gerbil is allowed).

i havent updated my page much with info about me or my life, so here is a pretty big update about me and my car...

back in March, i went to a junk yard to get parts for my partially wrecked car (a Cavalier). after realizing i had to purchase a LOT of parts, the owner of the junk yard suggested we just buy a new car. we explained that we (me and my wife) didnt have the kind of money to get a different car right then. they mentioned they had a car that ran that we could buy if we wanted. i checked it out. it was an 87 Celebrity... it had some damage on it (it had been in an accident itself), but we were told we could get parts for it off other cars to fix it up. we got the car for just $300.

i just got the car inspected this week, and it passed the safety inspection and the Missouri emissions tests. monday i should be getting plates for it. ironically, my Cavalier, which has cost me over ten grand, has failed all its tests, and wont be getting new tags for its license plates for a while now.

today i spent some times "fixing" up the car some more. my wife's dad had already replaced all the smashed parts on the car (simply because he has the needed tools, and he knows how to fix cars), but there was other things to work on.

here are the things i did with the car today:

i scraped about 8 pounds of rusted metal off the thing. in doing so, i accidentally uncovered a hole that had been rusted clear through the trunk... i can now put pennies into the trunk without even opening the thing up. :/

i used some rust repair spray on all spots i scraped. it "changes" rust to primer (according to the can). it makes rust and unpainted metal turn black and coats it with some weird shit (looks and feels like HUMAN SKIN).

i have some special "for cars only" spray paint to use on it. its a ligh blue (almost grey) color that i will use on the rusted parts. it will of course look like shit, but should be better than the 20+ rusted spots.

i got some fasteners for the license plates im gonna get for it monday. they are a chrome color, and said "for the designer look" on the package - so i just had to get them for my pimp car.

i bought some cloth "tacks" to use on the ceiling of the car. the cloth had come off, and was hanging down about 4 inches, which brushed against the top of my head and really annoyed me when i drove the car.

i bought a little clock that had a sticky background to mount on the dash board since the car has no clock built in. it has the same kind of radio most cars do today. all digital with nice controls. it simply lacks a clock for some reason.

i added a container of fuel injector cleaner to the gas tank. its supposed to clean up any problems in the tank and my engine. the car now makes popping sounds when it runs. it also dies when i have the air conditioner on. i guess i have to take the time to let it all burn out of the system. :(

i added a container of oil cleaner to the engine. its supposed to clean up the car's engine and everything oil related. after my next oil change, i will add a container of "oil stop leak" because there are some parts of the engine that have visible oil leaks. im hoping it will fix that.

i used a grease/gunk remover on the engine to clean off the almost solid inch of oil and crap that was caked on everything. i washed/wiped/scraped a good half pound of solid black "stuff" off the engine. it was mostly dirt/grit mixed with all the oil that has been leaking out the engine the past few years.

i then finished up by adding a french vanilla air freshener to the rear view mirror. mmmmmm...

so the car should be all ready to go by monday (unless it dies when i use the air conditioner). me and my wife will finally have two separate cars finally, so we can have a lot more "freedom" to do what we want instead of making our schedules out around the car use. that has been the biggest pain in the ass the past few weeks.

for some reason i feel special about the car, more than i did with my Cavalier. i guess its because i went through the whole process of "getting it myself". i found it, i paid for it all at once, and ive tried to fix it up. for my Cavalier, it was a car my dad "found" at a car dealership. he had signed all paper work and had it in his name. i was only 17 when i got the car, so i couldnt handle any of it really. we got a loan for it in his name, but it was me who paid for most of the car. so even having the Cavalier for years, it still seemed sorta like my dad's car. the Celebrity feels like its "all mine."